Mid Sweden University

In 2022, London’s Royal Court staged Lucy Kirkwood’s Rapture (June) and Martin Crimp’s Not One of These People (November). Kirkwood’s play was advertised as Dave Davidson’s That Is Not Who I Am; it was revealed to be Kirkwood’s Rapture in the first minutes of performance. It had a full run. Crimp’s play, on the other hand, running for four shows only, had a very limited one. The first balancing act, then, had to do with expectations: in the case of the former, putting trust into a play by a newcomer; in the second, cooperating with the strict schedule of the theatre, so as to ensure not to miss what was a contained and, by all accounts, unrepeatable event.

More balancing acts were required of spectators upon contact with the performance events, which involved negotiating different stimuli at the same time, as the plays made use of the Royal Court stage in novel and even groundbreaking ways, integrating technology that advocated for new interactions between the digital and the physical. Considering such factors, I will discuss how both productions developed new strategies for balancing two major crises: the climate crisis and the pandemic. I will propose that the sustainability of life and performance emerged as a key topic in different ways, both through the depiction of mental, emotional and physical health challenges, and through the development of new modes of creating and staging theatre at a time of programming uncertainty and a shifting artistic field, not least financially, and while dialogues concerning the footprint of performance making are emerging strongly.

The paper proceeds from research conducted for the project “Performing Interspaces: Social Fluidities in Contemporary Theatre”, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2022). It forms part of the monograph Environment and Fluidity in Contemporary Theatre: Staging Interspaces, completed and contracted with Palgrave Macmillan/Springer for open access publication.